Sweet and Sour Pie: A Wisconsin Boyhood

Envoi

190 l Envoi Idrove down to Manitowoc Rapids on a Saturday afternoon last January to have a look at the old schoolhouse. There have been a few changes. For one thing, the Rapids State Graded building is now an Amvet post. Schools as small as Rapids used to be no longer exist. They have been replaced by big, consolidated places a long bus ride from home. The mellow brick walls of Rapids school are still holding up, but the big windows that flooded our classrooms with sunlight have been removed and their frames filled in to save heat. A third-grader in Mrs. Eberhardt’s room would find it hard to read The Poky Little Puppy by the light of the few panes of glass that remain. Still, I’m glad someone is using the place and taking care of it. The sledding hill is paved now, and not as steep as it used to be. 191 There was a foot of snow on the ground in Rapids the day I was there, but there were no sled tracks, no snow forts or even footprints. No kids were visible anywhere. They were indoors watching television or fiddling with computers, I suppose. Their loss. Geezers who return to the scenes of their youth always marvel at how small things look to them. But everything around Rapids State Graded looked about the same size to me, except for the lot across the street where we played the softball World Series. If anything, it seemed bigger. It has grown up in trees, some of them two feet in diameter , and the sewie ditch has been filled in, although there are still traces of it if you know where to look. The lot is now officially a park, and a sign states the rules: “Mini Park No Dogs No Baseball.” No dogs? In the early ’50s, the neighborhood dogs played with us at recess and set their internal clocks by our lunch hour. In good weather we took our lunchboxes outside and the dogs would gather around and wait for scraps while we drank milk from our thermoses and ate our bologna sandwiches. Now there are no kids and no lunchboxes and nothing to attract a dog in the first place. Before I left I tried to estimate the length of Doyle’s home run. It was 250 feet, I figured, or maybe more—a prodigious distance for a fourteen-year-old boy to hit a wet softball. I was hungry for some penny candy, but Felix’s store was gone. The building was still there, though. It’s a doctor’s office now. The taverns on the corner have been replaced, one by a bank and the other by a convenience store, one of those magical places that can turn a twenty-dollar bill into three gallons of gas and a pack of cigarettes. I pulled in and filled the tank in my truck. Watching the numbers flicker on the pump, I calculated it would take almost $7.50 worth of gas to make the round-trip from Green Bay to Manitowoc Rapids. In 1950, seven bucks would have bought twenty-six gallons, enough to drive to Ohio for Christmas. Envoi 192 Envoi I was still hungry for something sweet, so I went into the store and looked around. There were shelves and shelves of candy, forty or fifty varieties, but all of it the same old stuff, sealed in people-proof wrappers that have to be hacked open with a mumblety-peg knife. I saw no candy in big glass jars and, God knows, nothing for a penny. As I drove home I wondered how to wrap up the ’50s. What a sweet and sour decade it had been: The Korean War and McCarthy. Nixon and Checkers and Pat’s “respectable Republican cloth coat.” A missile gap and “duck and cover” and fallout shelters. We had cars with tail fins and Firedome engines and a powerful thirst for gasoline. We had Rosa Parks in the back of the bus and Emmett Till on the bottom of the Tallahatchie River. But we also had the Milwaukee Braves and Henry Aaron, Elvis Presley and Miles Davis, James Dean and Ozzie Nelson, Jack Kerouac and Dave Brubeck, and Billy Graham. We had factories that made televisions and coffee pots and shoes. It seemed like everybody had a good job, and a...